google

The three-legged horse of the social media world is finally shutting down - but not because it's a continually awful experience. Following a massive data breach first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, Google announced today that it is shutting down its social network Google+ for consumers. The company finally admitted that Google+ never received the broad adoption or engagement with users that it had hoped for -- according to a blog post, 90 percent of Google+ user sessions last for less than five seconds.

The company discovered a bug in one of Google+'s People APIs that allowed apps access to data from Google+ profiles that weren't marked as public. It included static data fields such as name, email, occupation, gender and age.

In a rare moment of candidness a Google spokesdragon stated "...user engagement on the service was low".

Google+ will remain though as an Enterprise product where users don't get a choice of which platform to use.

Norwich’s market traders and small businesses are being given the chance to receive free digital skills training from Google to grow their business.

The Digital Garage session will be tailored to helping the owners reach new customers beyond their local area. It includes building a digital marketing plan, making your stall more visible online, and social media strategy.

Google will also bring its street view cameras to Norwich Market on Friday, allowing local market traders to benefit from the online presence to attract more customers.

We all hate popups, especially on a mobile device, so it's nice that Google has started to penalise sites which show interruptions. Thanks to new regulations, any mobile web page that uses interstitials or pop-up ads will see their Google ranking tumble.

The new rules have only been in place for a short while, but there are no reports of widespread impacts yet – likely because Google did give a significant warning period for people to adjust their web sites.

In summary, if a web page puposely hides content behind an ad or forces interaction with an ad, Google doesn’t like it. For now, these changes only apply to mobile versions of a site, so desktop pages are safe. But get rid of popups on desktop also, they're really annoying for everyone.

Google currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results.

So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them, and if enough spammy optimisation firms work on promoting their keywords.